Data Modeling or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Maths

This week's readings were real brain teasers! Lots of symbolic logic and math concepts I haven't thought about since algebra 2. The Wikipedia article of "normalization" was very challenging and I think it obfuscated the process. I found the University of Texas tutorial much more comprehensible. I wish I would have read UT's explanation first. Although I think I got the core idea of normalization, I am still unclear about the data manipulation operations used to perform the process. I didn't get how to multiply two data relational tables.

Another confusing thing to me was the lack of standards for notation of the Entity-Relationship Diagrams. I saw the relative strengths and weaknesses of the "crow's foot" style in the Data Modeling: Finding the Perfect Fit article as well as the "Martin" notational style used in all the University of Texas ERD diagrams. Martin does a better job of indicating parent-child relationships, but "crow's foot" does a better job at illustrating mandatory vs. optional existence of relationships and one-to-many relationships.